School of Distance Education

School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
55 
Maxwell calls this kind of knowledge “personalistic,” 
and argues that it must be combined with scientific 
knowledge if we are to attain true “wisdom. “The most 
recent novel that explores the theme of consciousness is 
Galatea 2.2
by Richard powers. The core story of 
Powers ‘novel is a wager about whether or not it is 
possible to build a machine that can pass an examination 
in English Literature. The narrator is called Richard 
Powers, and his biography corresponds quite closely to 
publicly known facts about the real author at the time of 
publications. He is 35 years old. He tells us that as a 
young man he was going to major in Physics at his 
Midwestern university but switched to English instead, 
started graduate work in literature but dropped out, lived 
in Boston for some time, lived in Holland for some time, 
published highly praised novels with scientific and 
speculative themes, received a prestigious fellowship 
which took him back to his alma mater in the Midwest, 
where the story of 
Galatea 2.2
begins—though the main 
narrative is interwoven with regular flashbacks 
describing his earlier life in some detail.
First Person and Third Person 
According to V S. Ramachandran, the “need to 
reconcile the first person and third person accounts of 
the universe . . . is the single most important problem in 
science.” Scientist Gerald Ederman finds it crucial in 
the understanding of consciousness. The problem with 
the consciousness is that how to give an objective third 
account perspective to a subjective or first person 
phenomenon. Lodge then analyses how Henry James' 
novel 
Wings of Dove 
gives an account of consciousness 

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
56 
in an objective sense. The diction is mostly subjective, 
belonging to Kate’s consciousness, and the syntax is 
objective. The change of personal pronoun also changes 
the effect of the verbal tense. In the original text the past 
tense is a storytelling convention. It doesn’t imply a gap 
between the time of the action and the time of the 
narration, or raise questions about the character of the 
narrator. First-person, present-tense narration is used in 
certain kinds of stream-of- consciousness fiction, where 
it is called interior monologue—in Joyce and Woolf. The 
most recent example is Nick Hornby’s
How to be Good. 
It really doesn’t go with James’s very literary 
narrative style, with his well-wrought syntax and 
elegant, balanced pairings and alliterations. By the time 
he wrote this novel, published in 1902, James had 
perfected a fictional method which allowed him to 
combine the eloquence of a literary, authorial narrative 
voice with the intimacy and immediacy of the first-
person phenomenon of consciousness.
Antonio Demasio, in 
The Feeling of What 
Happens
, observes that philosophy’s “preoccupation 
with what we call consciousness now is recent—three 
and a half centuries perhaps. The word did not exist 
before and neither did the concept. This era witnessed 
the emergence of a new narrative experience. Ian Watt in 
his famous work the 
Rise of the Novel 
states that The 
philosophical and literary changes are manifestations of 
a larger picture. A vast transformation of western 
civilization since renaissance. novelists were the first 
storytellers to pretend that their stories had never been 
told before, that they were entirely new and unique, 

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